December 16, 2014--Ready for Elizabeth Warren?

Elizabeth Warren has the perfect job for her. Senior senator from Massachusetts.

But like another senator, this one from Illinois, though she has served in the Senate for just two years, already there is a groundswell of interest in her running for President in 2016.

We know how the former junior senator from Illinois who in 2008 did manage to be elected President worked out.

So this is just what we don't need--another Harvard Law School professor as a potential President.

But support for her is growing exponentially since she took the lead in opposing the recent appropriation bill to fund the federal government. As an academic specialist in bankruptcy law and a progressive she was the ideal person to take the lead. Her objection to the bill was because buried in it was a provision to gut that part of Dodd-Frank that is designed to rein in big banks' ability to invest in risky derivatives, the loses from which would be covered again by the taxpayers, just as they were six years ago when these very sort of practices nearly bankrupted the country and cost us many billions to bail them out.

But President Warren?

She is adamantly denying that she is running or has any interest in running. And as long as Hillary Clinton is healthy enough to run, Warren undoubtedly will be true to her word. But if Hillary is seen to falter or falls down again and hits her head on the bathtub, Elizabeth Warren will be first in line to announce her candidacy.

In my work I have known hundreds of professors and the one thing they love more than anything is professing. Professing before as large an audience as possible.

Considering that whoever runs and ultimately gets elected will face so much resistance from Congress to any legislative agenda that nothing but the minimum will have any change of becoming law. There is that much rancorous partisanship on both sides plus a powerful antigovernment movement within the Republican congressional caucus. Thus, what we should be looking for in a potential president is someone who knows how to lead and, especially, run things.

Run things such as the Pentagon, the veterans administration, the IRS, the C.I.A., the federal health care system, federal involvement in education policy, whatever environmental protection programs that will manage to survive, border security and immigration policy, and of course our various global diplomatic and military involvements.

Is Elizabeth Warren ready for all this and more? Has she demonstrated any capacity to take on any of this? I think not.

But among progressives who want an ideologue in the race there is a growing ReadyForWarren movement that parallels ReadyForHillary. And money is flowing in, mainly from the West and East Coasts. Again, just what we don't need.

Above all, if we want an effective president, not just one who makes us feel warm and fuzzy and affirms our pieties, we should be looking for someone who has a demonstrated track record of actually having run something big, run it effectively, and one  who, like Warren to her considerable credit, knows that this time around, "It's the middle class, stupid."

December 18, 2013--Professing

Having been one at a number of institutions, from up-close observation, professors are not among my favorite professionals. For the most part, I prefer dentists.

Professors--tenured professors--have about the best job in the history of the world.

With what other kind of work can one make a very comfortable living with generous benefits, work two to three days a week, eight or at most nine months a year, and have frequent vacations? Almost as many as members of Congress. And then every few years have sabbaticals, which for a half to a full year offer full or half salary with no classroom or other university responsibilities. And, perhaps best of all, with tenure a professor can work until he or she drops and in no way be let go. Even for demonstrable incompetence or lack of research and publications.

And with all of this, professors are often among the world's most prolific whiners. About their university responsibilities (many would like to be paid, and paid more, for doing even less); about university politics (usually much to do about nothing or at most very little); about their colleagues and administrators; and about much that goes on in the world.

Criticizing and complaining they are very good at, but doing something about it is another matter.

So I was not surprised when a day or two ago, the American Studies Association, with about 5,000 professors as members, voted by a two-to-one margin to boycott Israeli academic institutions to protest Israel's treatment of Palestinians.

This means they will oppose academic exchange programs and Israeli professors will no longer be welcome as ASA members; invited to ASA-sponsored events; or, if the ASA has anything to do about it, be allowed to have sabbaticals in the U.S.

Next month, the much larger and more influential Modern Language Association will vote to ask the State Department to criticize Israel for allegedly barring American professors from going to Gaza or the West Bank when invited by Palestinian institutions.

The boycott is the first the ASA has ever instituted and what the MLA is calling for is equally unprecedented. They have not seen fit to take similar action in regard to Russian or Chinese academic institutions even though those governments curtail basic freedoms for almost all of their citizens. They did not call for the boycott of South African institutions during the Apartheid years. They are apparently OK with Iranian, Egyptian, Cuban, Venezuelan, Saudi Arabian, and Pakistani academic institutions though basic freedoms are severely restricted in these and, sadly, many other countries.

The fundamental case in favor of lifetime employment--tenure--is to protect academic freedom. To make professors impervious to arbitrary or ideological retribution when they express their contrarian views. So it is more than a little ironic that the ASA, for which one of its principals is the protection of freedom of thought and scholarly activity, would so blatantly, for ideological reasons, take such a censorious position.

The good news is that the major higher education organization in the United States, the American Association of University Professors opposes the boycott, saying that it makes little sense to focus on Israeli universities where criticism of government policy often originates.

Even Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas opposes the boycott. He said that it is inappropriate, as the ASA did, to compare Israel to Apartheid in South Africa. Further--

We are neighbors of Israel, we have agreements with israel, we are not asking anyone to boycott products of Israel.

But members of the ASA do not perceive any contradictions in their position. One member said that--

People who truly believe in academic freedom would realize protesting the blatant and systemic denial of academic freedom to Palestinians, which coupled with material deprivation of a staggering scale, far out ways concerns we in the West might have about our own rather privileged academic freedoms.

I am having trouble figuring out why we in the West who have the privilege of academic freedom should be immunized from the consequences of denying it to others.

I may have once been a professor, but I need help from other professors to help me understand and parse this tortured tangle of rationalization.